Jonah Porter

Jonah Porter

Material Art Fair 2016

Expo Reforma

Calle Morelos 67

Col. Juárez, Del. Cuauhtémoc

Mexico City, D.F. 06600

Mexico

Text and triangulation.

Through the signification of a word we are offered both bearing and heading, ground and directionality: a compass rose, perhaps. This orientation spins peculiarly around the viewer when the word may be read
backwards and upside down—perhaps the word is closest to the static needle of a spinning compass.

RotatoR is yoked to the sculpture largely as a kind of perceptual short-circuiting. The linguistic signification of “rotator” emphasizes the sense of swirling, but does not establish it. The erosion of legibility
begins the spinning of the fabric around the word. Reading the shimmering reflections on my bedroom wall
at night as reflections of passing cars speaks not to the faculty of language but the phenomenon directly preceding it. Rather than unearthing meaning, we undertake the process of recognition antecedent meaning.

Recognition.
There is a covenant between the eye and the word.
When I see a marquee scrolling words across its face, I do not see a eld of bulbs lighted, dowsed and relighted. The covenant establishes the primacy of the word, folding perception so the eye apprehends the
text before the sensible fabric across which it is splashed. Recognition is somewhere between perceptual
and cognitive faculties: rethinking the sensible. In rethinking what has been disclosed, we imagine permutations, morphologies, and contrast them with our own thresholds of legibility. The word breaches the surface
of the sensible, demanding recognition through legibility: exposing the covenant at the moment of its invocation.

The perceptual split exploited.

Eroded legibility is a glimpse, not of pre-linguistic recognition, rather the congress of perception and
cognition. Cognition adapted to the linguistic regime casts a pall over the perceptual faculties. The pall pre-figures the perceptual, so that the sensible fabric is first folded, then apprehended, accommodating the linguistic regime. These folds carve out lacunae, collecting the dross of the eye. Sifting back through the noise
reveals what is unconsciously discarded.

Object as diagram.

What becomes of the object once transformed, through the eye and hand of the artist, into the diagram
of its own image?

Serving as both medium and model for an illustration of itself, the object preempts its own disavowal:
the state of eventual uselessness destined for objects which operate or perform operations. Making legible
the condition of its design on its sensible fabric, the object is transformed into a machine manufacturing its
own preservation.

Sense, legibility, and the name and the face.

A mask is the name for the face if the eye insists on reading rather than seeing.
The name for an owl’s face manifests in the pigment of a moth’s wing. History creeps in: thousands of generations of moths gradually exploiting the perceptual split, folding their bodies into the lacunae of perception over geologic time. Bodies preserved through the re-inscription of the name for the eye.